The present disclosure relates to data storage environments and, more specifically, to improving the reliability of the storage.
The data generated and collected by network users may be stored in data centers connected to the network. A data center typically includes multiple storage devices and a storage management system that enables reading and writing of the data, data deduplication and coding, synching and sharing. The storage devices chosen for a data center generally contain highly reliable storage, though the probability of storage corruption is greater than zero. A variety of techniques are used for protection of the data against losses due to memory faults. For example, a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) may have same data written to two or more storage devices.
With the expansion of cloud computing and mobile devices, the demand for storage facilities grows and new data centers continue to be built. Storage systems typically start out having no data, and are filled over time. Accordingly, there is a significant amount of capacity over time that remains unused (‘free space’) during a typical storage deployment's early life.